Human Rights Protection in The Arab World: A Neo-Relativist Model

Abstract

The concept of human rights is considered as one of the main factors that promote humanity and dignity of a person in this world. This has led the international community to adopt the required measures to protect human rights internationally, such as the United Nations human rights agreements and their treaty bodies. Regional organisations have also followed suit and adopted their own human rights systems, including the League of Arab States (LAS). This research investigates the failure of the LAS in protecting human rights, primarily with reference to the Arab Spring. Therefore, improving the Arab human rights protection mechanisms is a priority. The human rights violations in the Arab region during the last three decades make it important to examine the Arab human rights system. Although the LAS attempted to adopt its own system to protect human rights, it failed to fulfil this target. Much research on the protection of Arab human rights has criticised the Arab human rights instruments. Most of them suggested reforming these instruments to become compatible with international human rights standards. Others have strictly preferred to adopt human rights which derived from culture and religion.

A doctrinal analysis and socio-legal methods are used to determine the most appropriate mechanism to protect and promote human rights in the Arab World, through proposing the Neo-Relativist approach; that is, applying one of the existences attempts of reconciling universalism and cultural relativism on the Arab human rights instruments. The reverse moderate cultural relativism has been chosen to be utilised in the Neo-Relativist approach, which has been applied on some of the problematic provisions of the Arab human rights instruments. The main findings in this research are that Arab human rights instruments can be enhanced without major amendments and that adopting the Neo-Relativist approach indicates that cultures must be given more weight than international standards for a better protection of human rights in the Arab World. This research concludes by providing number of important recommendations to improve the statutes of human rights in the Arab region.